Following Rules and Disobedience

If everyday you were conditioned to follow orders and rules, sooner or later, you stop thinking. When you stop thinking, you are liable to make stupid mistakes. Commanders make you follow their orders to the letter, then punish you when you mistakes. In such a system of only disincentives, and no incentives given to perform, the system is encouraging not a thinking soldier, but one robotic soldier. Disincentives serve to discourage us from making undesirable decisions, but it does nothing to encourage us to do better. And because you have to follow their decisions unquestioningly, your maximum performance can only be up to a certain point. And commanders make mistakes. Soldiers also make mistakes. Because the chain of command can be fairly long, the message is bound to get garbled somewhere. And thats where stupid mistakes appear.

Funnily, it takes only a few somebody to be a maverick and start disobeying orders, and for the system to become better. Certainly when you disobey, you are taking a risk that your disobedience could be a wrong decision. But there's always a chance that you have come up with a better idea. And this is what Singapore needs. A creative person, is one that does not always follow orders to the letter, but start deviating from the normal path. Deviants are a tricky thing to take care off. You cannot have too many deviants in your group, or else there is no discipline. The masses would be unruly, and there will no law and order. But having no deviants is a bad thing too, because you have on your hands a group of people with no initiative.

It is actually quite easy to correct that 'tame sheep' phenomenon. Just reward people who have followed the orders, and give even better reward for people who have taken the initiative to do something better. Punish when those people who disobeyed resulted in bad results on the overall.

A system with only punishments is definitely not enough. Rewards will also need to be sufficiently attractive.